Any Apple experts

[Filterlab]

Yes often on MacBooks we would see a none booting one, and doing as you say would get the customer up and running again, often saving them the expense of a new MLB(logic board), usually they had no back up so this would then become more important to them in case the unit failed completely in the future.

Indeed, keeps the computer going for a while. Mind you, data recovery is easy as mostly a failed logic board leaves the HDD or SSD intact - unless it's one of the infuriating new models (12" Retinas, 2018 Mac mini's and TouchBar MacBook Pro's - I'm looking at you) where the storage is soldered to the logic board as an inherent component. Grrrr!

I've trained my clients to back up; some have hugely extravagant back up systems, others use a single external. Any back up though is good - saves a lot of heartache and/or a lot of work for me to deep scan failing drives.

The SSDs are pretty resilient these days, although if they fail then mostly the data is gone forever too.

[AJSki2fly]

Indeed, keeps the computer going for a while. Mind you, data recovery is easy as mostly a failed logic board leaves the HDD or SSD intact - unless it's one of the infuriating new models (12" Retinas, 2018 Mac mini's and TouchBar MacBook Pro's - I'm looking at you) where the storage is soldered to the logic board as an inherent component. Grrrr!

I've trained my clients to back up; some have hugely extravagant back up systems, others use a single external. Any back up though is good - saves a lot of heartache and/or a lot of work for me to deep scan failing drives.

The SSDs are pretty resilient these days, although if they fail then mostly the data is gone forever too.

There is a way to get the data of a failed Apple MLB with soldered RAM, as long as the RAM has not been toasted when the MLB went tits-up, I saved several customers bacons doing this, although it is a last resort. I have resisted moving from my Late 2013 MacBook Pro which is a great machine, I am probably going to have to source a genuine replacement battery soon and do the tricky removal and replacement having stripped it apart. Also one or two of my the key are loosing their letters now. My experience with SSDs is much the same as with spinny disk drives, generally good for 4-5 years as long as a spinny one is not subject to sudden impacts.

SSDs can be a bit odd, there are several in MACs that are known to fail and have issues, some are OK for years and others just fail in a few weeks, Apple have had a few replacement programs fo some. I have seen units where we suspected the SSD was the cause of regular crashing and erratic running, even though invasive diagnostics said all was OK, replace the SSD and do a clean install and put the customers data back and all was fine, by the way that was after doing the same with the customer SSD and it making no difference.

Something I have also come across on several machines that will not boot at all, just black screens and then hangs, now a lot of techies will be lead down the path of assuming it is the MLB failed as no posting, even after PRAM reset etc. So they go ahead and put in a new MLB and still the same, so then they go, 'oh it must be the hard drive is corrupted and needs replacing', so in goes a new drive, they manage to get the OS to it and then same failure. so what can it be, put the customers hard drive and MLB back, remove the Wifi card and see if it boots, hey presto as if by magic it works, so we pop in a new Wifi card and fully test and it then passes diags with flying colours. The issue is that the Wifi card chip has a fault and on boot up the BootROM is getting screwed and hence no post, you would think that this would not happen as the wifi card is not part of the MLB, but I can assure you it does.

Some years ago I did set up a Hackintosh machine, Intel PC laptop running Apple OS, it was quite interesting playing around with the EFI to load up the right ones for the hardware to interface to the hardware and run OS. It did work but the laptop mouse/track pad could be erratic, software compatibility issues.

[rmcin626]

New iMac now updated with the additional 32gb of RAM, all good so far , thanks to Rob for his advice

[Filterlab]

Showing the full 40GB?

[rmcin626]

Showing the full 40GB?

Yes

[Filterlab]

Ace.

[dave2010]

Is it clearly better with the extra memory?

If so, I might bring my plans to put the extra memory into ours forward.

[rmcin626]

Is it clearly better with the extra memory?

If so, I might bring my plans to put the extra memory into ours forward.

Only been running with the additional RAM for a day, and went into a new machine.